Andrea Benetti’s pictorial work stems from the awareness of the broken harmony, the original yet now severed integration between man and nature.
Certainly, in ancient times, there was a primal fear towards the Great Mother; but even when “nature was not perceived as a threat, man respected it with the reverence due to a deity.”
Modern man—writes the artist—has “shattered an enchantment and desecrated the sacredness of nature and life.”
This diagnosis is now widely acknowledged, yet it must not remain purely theoretical, confined to an abstract and inert disposition.
Starting with art: it is essential, Benetti argues, to recover the original linguistic values of aesthetic creation, particularly those of prehistoric expressiveness.
Works such as Mulini a vento, Percorsi, Incontro fortunato (all from 2009)—paintings that, however, with their relief elements, attain a degree of three-dimensionality—seek to interpret, through vivid chromatic choices and strongly structured compositions, the formal synthesis and expressive clarity of that primordial yet, in some respects, unsurpassed figurative civilization.
An art capable of “symbolically returning to its origins,” without, however, losing (nor would it truly be possible, after all) awareness of all that has transpired in the meantime.